ArticleAesthetic surgery journal2022
Industry Payments to Plastic Surgeons: What Has Changed Over the Last 6 Years Following Implementation of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act?
Article in Aesthetic surgery journal, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Industry Payments to Plastic Surgeons: A Blind Spot for Physician Accountability in Canada.Plastic surgery (Oakville, Ont.) · 2025Article
- Facial plating industry payments: An analysis of the open payments database.Laryngoscope investigative otolaryngology · 2023Article
- Conflict of Interest and Plastic Surgery Journal Editors: The Problem and the Solution.Annals of plastic surgery · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThe Open Payments Program, as designated by the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, is the single largest repository of industry payments made to licensed physicians within the United States. Though sizeable in its dataset, the database and user interface are limited in their ability to permit expansive data interpretation and summarization.
objectivesThe authors sought to comprehensively compare industry payments made to plastic surgeons with payments made to all surgeons and all physicians to elucidate industry relationships since implementation.
methodsThe Open Payments Database was queried between 2014 and 2019, and inclusion criteria were applied. These data were evaluated in aggregate and for yearly totals, payment type, and geographic distribution.
resultsA total 61,000,728 unique payments totaling $11,815,248,549 were identified over the 6-year study period; 9089 plastic surgeons, 121,151 surgeons, and 796,260 total physicians received these payments. Plastic surgeons annually received significantly less payment than all surgeons (P = 0.0005). However, plastic surgeons did not receive significantly more payment than all physicians (P = 0.0840). Cash and cash equivalents proved to be the most common form of payment; stock and stock options were least commonly transferred. Plastic surgeons in Tennessee received the most in payments between 2014 and 2019 (mean $76,420.75). California had the greatest number of plastic surgeons who received payments (1452 surgeons).
conclusionsPlastic surgeons received more in industry payments than the average of all physicians but received less than all surgeons. The most common payment was cash transactions. Over the past 6 years, geographic trends in industry payments have remained stable.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.